Hats came off before the I-X Center crowd sang The Star-Spangled Banner on Saturday at the Donald Trump rally in Cleveland.
Any man who failed to do so was admonished from the stage to remove his “head gear.”
The mostly white, mostly over-40 crowd that numbered in the thousands welcomed the throwback etiquette, dutifully covering hearts with hands while saying the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath many learned to recite every morning in grade school decades before.
No one seemed angry. Not even tense.
Less than 20 hours after violent skirmishes erupted at a Trump rally in Chicago, people at the Cleveland event expressed mostly hope.
Many said they had been waiting for years to vote for someone like Trump, an outsider who might fix a political system they said was broken by insiders beholden to lobbyists and special interests.
“Enough lip service,” said Clark Gray, 61, a retired machinist from Elyria, Saturday, holding one of thousands of professionally printed Trump signs passed out to those in the crowd.
Gray, a Reagan Democrat, choked up when he talked about the 1980s and what it felt like to be working and living during a prosperous time.
“We need someone who can make us proud to be Americans again.”
The road to Trump’s Saturday afternoon rally literally passed through a slice of the American Rust Belt that his supporters believe he can make great again, something they said politicians from both parties have promised but failed to do for decades.
It started in Cleveland, a city whose peak population of 900,000 now hovers just under 400,000.
It passed by the sprawling Brook Park Ford factory where 15,000 jobs dwindled to less than 100 before rebounding to around 1,500.
And it ended inside the former Cleveland Tank Plant, another factory that once employed 15,000 before its cavernous space was repurposed and finally converted into the I-X Center, which hosts car and home shows, an indoor amusement park and all sorts of events.
“Jobs,” Fran Claus, 69, of Lorain said as her 4-year-old grandson licked an ice cream cone. “We need better jobs.”
The retired health club manager is sort of a Trump evangelist. She spread the word to her three daughters who were at the rally with her after doing research of their own.
The youngest, Daniella Hensley, 42, of Medina, said Trump offers “disruptive innovation” that can yield three things she wants: Jobs, protection of the homeland and a change in U.S. relationships with foreign governments.
“We’re sick of hearing the same thing over and over again,” Hensley said. “Trump has a history of surrounding himself with good people who can get things done.”
Trump, from the stage, fed the crowd what they were hungry for.
He called out Ford for moving jobs to Mexico. Then he called out Cleveland-based Eaton Corp, which cut about 2,500 jobs last year when it closed eight factories. Last month, it announced closing its Berea factory, too, killing 100 more jobs.
“We want our factories here,” Trump told the crowd, pausing for their cheers. “We want to keep our factories here.”
Two groups of protesters disrupted Trump’s speech within the first six minutes. As about six protesters were quickly escorted out by security, several used mobile phones to videotape what was happening, screaming: “This is not America! This is not America!”
Over the next half-hour, security spirited away at least 50 protesters, including two doctors who took off sweatshirts to reveal T-shirts printed with “Muslim Doctors Save Lives in Cleveland.”
Trump supporters sometimes booed, but as Trump’s campaign instructed before the rally began, they didn’t touch protesters.
Violence at Trump’s Chicago rally appeared to be largely over race. One black protester in Cleveland on Saturday held a sign reading, “Donald Trump/Make America White Again.”
Yet in Cleveland, an African-American preacher, Darrell Scott from New Spirit Revival Church in Cleveland Heights, introduced Trump. A handful of black, Asian and Middle Eastern people were in the crowd to support him.
Scott drew the loudest applause of the day when he told the crowd to ignore what the “liberal media” have been saying about Trump and his supporters.
“We’re smart people. We’re intelligent people. We’re independent thinkers,” Scott said. “The Democratic Party has drifted too far away from traditional values that made us great.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.